665 research outputs found
How to prioritize species recovery after a megafire
No full textFirst published: 13 May 2022Due to climate change, megafires are increasingly common and have sudden, extensive impacts on many species over vast areas, leaving decision makers uncertain about how best to prioritize recovery. We devised a decision-support framework to prioritize conservation actions to improve species outcomes immediately after a megafire. Complementary locations are selected to extend recovery actions across all fire-affected species' habitats. We applied our method to areas burned in the 2019-2020 Australian megafires and assessed its conservation advantages by comparing our results with outcomes of a site-richness approach (i.e., identifying areas that cost-effectively recover the most species in any one location). We found that 290 threatened species were likely severely affected and will require immediate conservation action to prevent population declines and possible extirpation. We identified 179 subregions, mostly in southeastern Australia, that are key locations to extend actions that benefit multiple species. Cost savings were over AU$300 million to reduce 95% of threats across all species. Our complementarity-based prioritization also spread postfire management actions across a wider proportion of the study area compared with the site-richness method (43% vs. 37% of the landscape managed, respectively) and put more of each species' range under management (average 90% vs. 79% of every species' habitat managed). In addition to wildfire response, our framework can be used to prioritize conservation actions that will best mitigate threats affecting species following other extreme environmental events (e.g., floods and drought).Michelle Ward, Josie Carwardine, James E. M. Watson, Anna Pintor, Stephanie Stuart, Hugh P. Possingham, Jonathan R. Rhodes, Alexander R. Carey, Nancy Auerbach, April Reside, Chuan Ji Yong, Ayesha I. T. Tulloc
Self managing monitoring for highly elastic large scale Cloud deployments
No full textInfrastructure as a Service computing exhibits a number of properties, which are not found in conventional server deployments. Elasticity is among the most significant of these properties which has wide reaching implications for applications deployed in cloud hosted VMs. Among the applications affected by elasticity is monitoring. In this paper we investigate the challenges of monitoring large cloud deployments and how these challenges differ from previous monitoring problems. In order to meet these unique challenges we propose Varanus, a highly scalable monitoring tool resistant to the effects of rapid elasticity. This tool breaks with many of the conventions of previous monitoring systems and leverages a multi-tier P2P architecture in order to achieve in situ monitoring without the need for dedicated monitoring infrastructure. We then evaluate Varanus against current monitoring architectures. We find that conventional monitoring tools perform acceptably for small, non changing cloud deployments. However in the case of large or highly elastic deployments current tools perform unacceptably incurring increased latencies, high load and slowed operation necessitating that a new, alternative tool be used. Further, we demonstrate that Varanus maintains low latency and low resource monitoring state propagation at scale and during during periods of high elasticity
Observing the clouds : a survey and taxonomy of cloud monitoring
No full textThis research was supported by a Royal Society Industry Fellowship and an Amazon Web Services (AWS) grant. Date of Acceptance: 10/12/2014Monitoring is an important aspect of designing and maintaining large-scale systems. Cloud computing presents a unique set of challenges to monitoring including: on-demand infrastructure, unprecedented scalability, rapid elasticity and performance uncertainty. There are a wide range of monitoring tools originating from cluster and high-performance computing, grid computing and enterprise computing, as well as a series of newer bespoke tools, which have been designed exclusively for cloud monitoring. These tools express a number of common elements and designs, which address the demands of cloud monitoring to various degrees. This paper performs an exhaustive survey of contemporary monitoring tools from which we derive a taxonomy, which examines how effectively existing tools and designs meet the challenges of cloud monitoring. We conclude by examining the socio-technical aspects of monitoring, and investigate the engineering challenges and practices behind implementing monitoring strategies for cloud computing.Peer reviewe
The sentiments of a Church-of-England man : a study of Swift's politics
No full textThis contextualist study re-examines the contested critical
question of Jonathan Swift's political character. It is
concerned with the historical meaning of Swift's texts
and attempts to recover their original political impact.
Politically-literate contemporaries claimed to read Jacobite
Tory politics in Swift's texts. Rather than dismiss the
judgement of Swift's contemporaries, this study asks whether
there is anything about Swift's political writing in polemical
context that could have led contemporaries to construe
the politics of his texts as Jacobite Tory. The conclusion
this study reaches is that aspects of Swift's political
rhetoric are consonant with Tory and Jacobite polemic.
While contesting current conceptions of Swift as a Whig,
this study offers a partial revision of that scholarship
which describes Swift as a non-Jacobite Tory.
The thesis is based on an analysis of Swift's prose, poetry
and correspondence and contemporary (mainly printed) sources
books, pamphlets, poems on affairs of state and newspapers.
Some new or neglected polemical contexts and analogues
for Swift's works are suggested. Chapter 1 considers some
of the problems and contested issues in interpretation
of Swift's political biography and writing. Chapter 2
witnesses Swift's combination of High Church attitudes
with a radical political critique of Whig establishment.
Swift is read in juxtaposition with Jacobite Tory authors
such as George Granville, Lord Lansdowne. Chapter 3 relocates
A Tale of a Tub in historical context to reveal the satire's
relation to High Church Tory polemical languages. Chapter
4 discusses the disaffected Tory aspect of Gulliver's
Travels. Chapter 5 attempts to register the complexity
of the textual evidence of Swift's attitude to Jacobitism.
Detailed attention is given to his politically-revealing
attitudes to the Dutch. A coda briefly describes Swift's
discontent with the Revolution settlement, examines this
Church-of-England Man's sentiments on the crucial ideological
issue of resistance, and suggests the importance of Hugo
Grotius in Swift's political thought
Wolfgang Koeppen: 'Unmasking' the 'Author' of a Holocaust Testimony
No full textThe possibility that works of art and literature might be forged and that identity might be faked has haunted the cultural imagination for centuries. That spectre seems to have returned with a vengeance recently, with a series of celebrated hoaxes and scandals ranging from the Alan Sokal hoax article in Social Text to Binjamin Wilkomirski's "fake" Holocaust memoir. But as well as creating anxiety, the possibility of "faking it" has now been turned into entertainment. Traditionally these activities have been dismissed as dangerous and immoral, but more recently some scholars have begun to speculate, for example, that all forms of national identity rely on forged myths of origin. Recent cultural theory has likewise called into question traditional notions of authenticity and originality in both personal identity and in works of art. Despite critical pronouncements of the death of the author and the substitution of the simulacrum for the original, however, making a distinction between the genuine and the fake continues to play a major role in our everyday understanding and evaluation of culture, law and politics. Consider, for example, the fiasco surrounding the "forged" Hitler diaries, law suits against auction houses for failing to detect forgeries in the art market, or the problem of plagiarism at universities. It still seems to matter that we can spot the difference, especially in the historical moment when we are capable of making copies that are indistinguishable perhaps even better than the original. This collection of essays considers the moral, aesthetic and political questions that are raised by the long history and current prevalence of fakes and forgeries. The international team of contributors consider the issues thrown up by a wide range of examples, drawn from fields ranging from literature to art history. These case studies include little-known subjects such as Eddie Burrup, the Australian aboriginal artist who turned out to be an 81-year-old white woman, as well as new interpretations of familiar cases such as faked holocaust memoirs. The strength of the collection is that it brings together not only a wide range of cultural examples of fakes and forgeries from different historical periods, but also offers a wide variety of theoretical takes that will form a useful introduction and casebook on this growing field of inquiry
How does fair trade, as practised by Trade Aid and MINKA, contribute to the aspirations of Quechua producers in Peru?
No full textAs part of a Master of Indigenous Studies from the University of Otago, Trade Aid staff member, Michelia Ward, conducted research throughout 2011 and 2012 on whether fair trade is able to contribute to the aspirations of indigenous producers. The research focused on fair trade as practiced by Trade Aid, New Zealand and one of its Peruvian partners, MINKA.Fair trade is a development mechanism that aims to support food and craft producers around the world to improve their lives through trade. Many indigenous communities are producers of craft or food products such as woven textiles and coffee, and have engaged in fair trade relationships selling mainly to Western consumers. Fair trade organisations have universal principles that provide guarantees to consumers about working conditions, fair payment and trading relations with producer groups. This research project focuses on whether a universal framework designed to bring development to disadvantaged and marginalized producers can work for unique indigenous cultures across multiple continents. This research focuses on Trade Aid in New Zealand and their partnership with a Peruvian fair trade organisation, MINKA, who works with Quechua producers in the Andes. Indigenous theorists place large value on local epistemes (knowledge systems) and local solutions to local problems. Is fair trade one of these local solutions, or just another solution imposed from the outside upon indigenous producers
Efficient monitoring of large scale infrastructure as a service clouds
No full textCloud computing has had a transformative effect upon distributed systems
research. It has been one of the precursors of supposed big data revolution
and has amplified the scale of software, networks, data and deployments.
Monitoring tools have not, however, kept pace with these developments.
Scale is central to cloud computing but it is not its chiefly defining property.
Elasticity, the ability of a cloud deployment to rapidly and regularly change
in scale and composition, is what differentiates cloud computing from
alternative paradigms of computation. Older tools originating from cluster,
grid and enterprise computing predominantly lack designs which allow
them to tolerate huge scale and rapid elasticity. This has led to the
development of monitoring as a service tools; third party tools which
abstract the intricacies of the monitoring process from the end user. These
tools rely upon an economy of scale in order to deploy large numbers of
VMs or servers which monitor multiple users’ infrastructure. These tools
have restricted functionality and trust critical operations to third parties,
which often lack reliable SLAs and which often charge significant costs. We
therefore contend that an alternative is necessary.
This thesis investigates the domain of cloud monitoring and proposes
Varanus, a new cloud monitoring tool, which eschews conventional
architectures in order to outperform current tools in a cloud setting. We
compare a number of aspects of performance including monitoring latency,
resource usage and elasticity tolerance. Through investigation of current
monitoring approaches in conjunction with a thorough examination of
cloud computing we derive a design for a new tool which leverages peer
to peer and autonomic computing in order to build a tool well suited to
the requirements of cloud computing. Through a detailed evaluation we
demonstrate how this tool withstands the effects of scale and elasticity
which impair current tools and how it employs a novel architecture which
reduces fiscal costs. We demonstrate that Varanus maintains a low, near 1
second monitoring latency, regardless of both scale and elasticity and does
so without imparting significant computational costs. We conclude that this
design embodied by this tool represents a successful alternative to current
conventional and monitoring as a service tools
Microtubule-Dependent Alterations to Mechanical Properties and Mechanotransduction in Skeletal Muscle
No full textAtlantic contingency : Jonathan Dickinson and the Anglo-Atlantic world, 1655-1725
No full textThis dissertation is about how Jonathan Dickinson (1663-1722), a second-generation
Anglo-Jamaican planter and early-Philadelphian merchant, made sense of the mercurial
and uncertain Atlantic world around the turn of the eighteenth century. The following
chapters examine Dickinson’s interactions with an extremely diverse group of European,
Native American, and African peoples who collectively comprised a formative
generation of colonial society in North America and the West Indies. The main purpose
of this dissertation is to provide a counterpoint to the many tautologous, whiggish, and
nationalistic interpretations of Anglo-Atlantic history that tend to deemphasise the
obvious disconnections, disruptions, discord, and diversity apparent during the lateseventeenth
and early-eighteenth centuries. This dissertation further contends that
individuals, driven by self-preservation and influenced by local circumstances, dictated
the direction and the pace of many inter-colonial, inter-imperial, and trans-Atlantic
developments familiar to the late-eighteenth century Anglo-Atlantic world. In short, new
exigencies outweighed custom, and self-preservation, rather than directives from
metropolitan governments, guided Atlantic peoples’ actions. By extension of individual
actions, the nascent British Atlantic Empire began to take shape
Cloud cover : monitoring large-scale clouds with Varanus
No full textThis research was supported by a Royal Society Industry Fellowship and an Amazon Web Services (AWS) grant.Cloud computing has quickly become the de facto means to deploy large scale systems in a robust and cost effective manner. Central to the maintenance of large scale systems is monitoring which allows for the detection of faults, errors and anomalies and the enacting of optimisation and corrective measures. Monitoring large scale systems is significant challenge requiring the low latency movement of large volumes of data and near real time analysis. This challenge is magnified by elasticity and other cloud properties which previous monitoring systems do not yet fully account for. In this paper we propose Varanus 1 a cloud aware monitoring tool that provides robust, fault tolerant monitoring at scale. We describe in detail the mechanisms which enable Varanus to function effectively and explore the performance of Varanus through a detailed evaluation.Peer reviewe
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